Something is Up with Matt Stafford and Russell Wilson

"There's gold in them thar hills." Good luck finding it.

Remember wall-based phones? The good ol’ days, right? The batteries never died. You could hear people's voices clearly. Sure, there wasn't caller ID, and you had to deal with occasional busy signals, but as long as you heard a dial tone, you pretty much knew what you were going to get. I yearn for a wall-based phone - something easy to understand.

Statistics are that way now days too. Football Outsiders is great, DVOA and what not. I get it; it's better. However, is there still any analysis that can be gleaned from the old school, low IQ stats most of us grew up on?

There's no dumber stat than total "attempts" by a quarterback. Dumb, brute force numbers even I can understand. When you look at total passing attempts, two things stand out:

• Matt Stafford has led the NFL in this "stat" for two straight years. He's not going to be touted as elite next year, but you have to like a guy that is one year removed from the top 5 (in QB fantasy total points), and gets more opportunities to throw it than any other QB in the league. (Also, there's that Calvin Johnson thing.) Stafford chucked it 727 times, outpacing second place, Drew Brees (670 attempts), by 57 attempts. That's roughly the equivalent of playing an extra game or two than most QBs.

• On the flipside, Russell Wilson only threw it 393 times or almost half as many times as Stafford. No QB that played 16 games had less attempts than Wilson. In fact, no QB that played 14 games threw it less than Wilson. In fact, no QB that played 13 games threw it less than Wilson. (Colin Kaepernick technically played in 13 games, but many of those were only for a series or two.) I could keep going but you get the point.

What is my point? Well it's kind of like the mid 1980’s when you first tried to call someone and you encountered an answering machine for the very first time. You’re thrown off guard. You know there's something you should be able to do to communicate, but you weren't quite sure what it is yet. So for now, I just want to point to these couple of oddities, maybe do some raspy, breathless breathing and hang up.